Women in Shakespeare's Sonnet 130

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Women in Shakespeare's Sonnet 130

Shakespeare is expressing, though not in the first person, that he knows women are not the perfect beauties they are portrayed to be and that we should love them anyway. He uses two types of descriptions, one of their physical beauty and the other of their characteristics to make fun of all those ‘romantic’ poets trying to ‘brown nose’ the girls they like.

One of the physical attributes, in the first quatrain, that he mentions is his “mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” meaning she has no ‘twinkle’ in her eyes. In the first quatrain, he also speaks of coral as being “far more red” than the lips of his mistress; this is a use of imagery to show her non-beauty. He also recognizes that there are “no such roses” on her cheeks in the second quatra...

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